Modeling latent variables with priors and hyperpriors is an essential problem in variational image compression. Formally, trade-off between rate and distortion is handled well if priors and hyperpriors precisely describe latent variables.

Current practices only adopt univariate priors and process each variable individually. However, we find inter-correlations and intra-correlations exist when observing latent variables in a vectorized perspective.

These findings reveal visual redundancies to improve rate-distortion performance and parallel processing ability to speed up compression. This encourages us to propose a novel vectorized prior.

Specifically, a multivariate Gaussian mixture is proposed with means and covariances to be estimated. Then, a novel probabilistic vector quantization is utilized to effectively approximate means, and remaining covariances are further induced to a unified mixture and solved by cascaded estimation without context models involved.

Furthermore, codebooks involved in quantization are extended to multi-codebooks for complexity reduction, which formulates an efficient compression procedure. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets against state-of-the-art indicate our model has better rate-distortion performance and an impressive $3.18\times$ compression speed up, giving us the ability to perform real-time, high-quality variational image compression in practice.

Our source code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/xiaosu-zhu/McQuic}.